Re: [multiarch] Proposal for *-dev packages

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

On Thursday 15 January 2004 11:48 am, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> | Other could do with conflicting -dev packages. But the majority of
> | people I talked to so far would like to havethem installed in parallel
> | instead of having to purge and reinstall them each time they compile
> | for a different bit depth.
> |
> | Just consider compiling a benchmark that tests 32 bit and 64 bit
> | support. That would be hell.
>
> We aren't gentoo.  Users aren't supposed to do that, but if they do,
> they should use a chroot.  Optimize for the common case.

I disagree.

I suspect a good number of Debian users are developers like myself. A 
multiarch system is IMHO fairly useless if you can only use it to develop 
software for the 'primary' subarch. This is especially true eg. on mips where 
preferred subarch depends on the application (n32 for speed vs. n64 for 
address space).

Also, providing a multiarch gcc/libc is only of limited use if all the other 
-dev packages only support a single arch. Reinstalling the -dev package to 
compile for a different subarch really isn't practical.

Paul